“What advice do you have for someone who is about to embark on their first international trip?” Mina asked. “I’m just really hoping that nothing bad happens.”
The sun dipped below the horizon as we floated on a felucca in the middle of the Nile River. My companion, who owned the hostel in Cairo where I was staying, was getting ready to finally take an adult gap year of his own. Though he hosted travelers from all over the world, he had not yet ventured outside his country – and was feeling nervous about doing so.
Scenes from a Nile River sunset cruise. Mina stands on the bow of a felucca (top). Two feluccas with party lights at dusk (bottom).
“Well,” I said, “something bad is definitely going to happen. And you’re going to be fine.”
He laughed.
“I’m serious,” I said. “Lots of bad things have happened to me, and continue to happen to me, as I have continued to travel.”
Our felucca captain kept falling asleep while we were motoring away in the middle of the Nile. Nothing bad happened. 😂
Earlier that day, I had money stolen from me. It was a sleight of hand trick common in Egypt when you are paying with cash. I counted out the money and when the waiter took it and counted it back, it was missing a bill. A big bill.
“The truth is that as you travel,” I said, “a huge part of the personal growth you are going to experience is the expansion in your tolerance for discomfort. All of these crazy things are going to happen to you – bad things and good things – and you’re always, on the other side of it, going to be fine."
He smiled and shook his head. “That is not the reassuring advice I was hoping to hear, but it’s probably the advice I needed to hear.”
There's a difference between having faith that everything will work itself out in the end, and knowing from experience that everything always seems to work itself out in the end. The ups and downs of travel give us that knowing – and with it, the capacity to handle the bigger challenges of life.
He already knew of the money incident from earlier in the day, so I told him what happened to me the very first time I ever took a solo vacation abroad.
Within 15 minutes of landing at the airport in Lima, Peru, my phone was stolen. I hadn’t even cleared customs yet. Another passenger from my plane stole my phone. Yep. It was zipped up in my jacket pocket, which I was wearing around my waist, because it was December – cold where I came from, but hot in Peru. A really nice man from my flight made conversation with me as we were waiting for our bags. I'm pretty sure that’s where it happened, unless it happened on the shuttle bus from the plane to the baggage area, because by the time I brought my bags over to the security scanner, my phone was gone.
Luckily I had travel insurance, which wound up covering half of the cost of a new phone, which I got when I returned to the U.S. 10 days later.
What wasn’t replaceable, however, were the year’s worth of photos that I had on the phone. I don’t pay for iCloud storage, so I manually back up my phone once a month to my computer, which I remember to do because I have a recurring calendar invite that tells me to do it.
But I didn’t have that then. I have it now, because of that incident. Back then, which was Christmas 2016, I lost that entire calendar year’s worth of photos, because I got a new phone for Christmas 2015, and never once backed up my phone. That was the year that I spent in the hospital healing from an intensive abdominal surgery, so, save for a handful of pictures I posted on social media, all of those memories were gone too.
At the time, I was heartbroken. Looking back on it now, it is almost like the universe was telling me to put that year in the rearview mirror. Actually, not even in the rearview mirror, because in losing the photos, I couldn't look back on it at all. Time to let it go, was the message. Time to let go of all you have been through and all that you have lost.
It is easy to get stuck in one narrative of events – this is bad, that is good – and miss the complexity of a life that is often both/and, not either/or.
Mina's jaw dropped. "How on earth did you make it through Peru for 10 days without a phone???"
After filing a police report at the airport – which was necessary for being able to file the travel insurance claim, but also, I still held onto some small hope that the phone and my photos would turn up – I took an overpriced cab to the local tourist office.
Even though I told my cab driver what had happened to me, he overcharged me, which I suspected when we agreed to the rate, but I didn't have a lot of options without a phone. When I arrived at the tourist office they confirmed my suspicion, and helpfully gave me some understanding of fares and distances in the city so I wouldn't be negotiating blind again.
Then I asked to borrow their computer so that I could send an email to my parents to let them know what happened and have Verizon disable my phone, lest the thief figure out how to hack it and extort anyone for a ransom. Looking back, I have no clue how I got into my email, because today, Gmail would most certainly try to 2-step verify me, which I wouldn’t be able to do because I didn’t have my phone. But somehow, it worked, and I sent the email.
And then I wandered.
Sometimes I practiced my Spanish and asked for directions.
But mostly I enjoyed the silence and disconnection. I was in an entirely new world, all on my own. Without being able to really navigate to "the places to see" or "the restaurants not to be missed", I discovered the unexpected joy of, well, discovery. This place looks nice, I wonder what's inside! It might have been the first time since I was a child that I spent a day doing whatever I felt like doing at any moment.
Was I upset about my phone? Yes. Absolutely. But after the police report and the tourist office, and half a day of my 10-day trip gone, I realized I had a choice. I could choose to continue wallowing about my phone. Or I could accept the loss and move forward and just enjoy my trip.
My feelings about the outcome were not going to change the outcome. So I chose to have the experience of life that felt better.
If there was anything that year in the hospital had taught me, it was that life is too short. It is too short to mourn the loss of something that will never come back. So I embraced the moment, and made new memories.
On the second to last night of the trek, the girl sharing my tent whispered, "Have you seen the movie Inside Out?"
"Yeah," I murmured, half-asleep. "Why?"
"You remind me of one of the characters," she said. "Joy."
I smiled. It felt like a compliment, after a year that felt far from joyful.
At the end of the trip, I hiked over four days to the top of Machu Picchu, taking photos on a 2005 Canon point and shoot I had thought to pack as a backup in case my phone died on the trek. See, I wasn’t totally unprepared. I just wasn’t prepared for everything.
Then again, who is?
And that’s really my advice, my number one tip for any traveler. Prepare, but accept the reality that there are some things you won't be prepared for. And you are going to be fine.
